I watched "The Internet's Own Boy" about Aaron Swartz a few days ago. Wonderful motivation: make academic literature publically accessable. Stupid juvenile implementation: download a million papers from JSTOR in an MIT wiring closet. Horrible outcome: Federal prosecution, suicide.
I'll let others march in the streets and demand free ice cream and ponies. I hope that works, but I wouldn't bet on it. I want to make the information contained in academic literature publically accessable ... and versioned, and updated, and weblinked, and supported. The academics here might have some ideas. What if: We (meaning those more capable than me) construct a software environment for disassembing the pdf elements of an academic paper, which a moderately literate person can use to REWRITE and redraw and reformat the paper as a substantially different work with an updated version of the same information in it? I am inspired by some of the capabilities in Inkscape for reworking graphics into SVG. What if we improve that process, for example tying a graph in an old paper to data from new research that verifies, refines, or refutes it? Move the slider on the graph from an original 1960 paper to a new graph that incorporates 2017 data? I have about a dozen published journal papers out there (one with over 200 citations) that I would love to "de-copyright" out of the clutches of the IEEE, Elsevier, etc. My newest stuff is publically posted as pre- publication drafts before I submit it, but I would love simple tools that would ease the process of liberating my older work. I'd be glad to help as an alpha-test guinea pig, also use the tool for new writing projects. There are other papers by other authors, some long since dead, that I would love to apply the same treatment to, so I can cite the liberated version in my open version. At the end of the rewrite process, the tool can compare the original and the liberated versions and estimate the legally actionable overlap, which a creative-commons community can continue to rework until the overlap is zero, and also re-rework if legal threats or court decisions add new restrictions to work around. I expect the Big Content owners will attempt to enact legislation to forbid the process, but I believe we can rewrite code and evade restrictions faster than they can write and pass legislation. If they are panicky in their legislative responses, we can probably trick them into passing laws against their own practices. 95% of the work out there is obscure, and the world does not need a rewrite. If 10 million (WAG) academic papers have ever been written, that might mean 500,000 to be processed. That would be a lot more work than went into wikipedia, but a lot fewer hours than all US citizens waste on TV in a year. It might take a few decades, but a small subset of the world's thinkers could eventually get this done, and incorporate the process into the training of new scholars. Hopefully, the tools that we write will become the go-to tools for the creation of new works, a dual path process for authors that produces both a terse, stylized version that the JSTORs and Elseviers of the world can greedily guard and sell ... ... and an open, updatable, friendly version of the document that 99% of the world will actually use. Personally, I would love it if my best papers outlived me by centuries, steadily improving and accumulating hundreds of coauthors into the far future. While this would be a very complicated suite of tools to write, it's gotta be a lot easier than designing rockets and self-driving cars. Am I nuts? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com